David Thomas, bandleader and frontman of the avant-rock band Pere Ubu has died at the age of 71 after what has been described as “a long illness.”
The same statement on Pere Ubu’s Facebook page said that he died “in his home town of Brighton & Hove, with his wife and youngest step-daughter by his side. MC5 were playing on the radio.” It went on to say that “he will ultimately be returned to his [family] home, the farm in Pennsylvania, where he insisted he was to be ‘thrown in the barn’ … We’ll leave you with his own words, which sums up who he was better than we can: ‘My name is David Fucking Thomas… and I’m the lead singer of the best fucking rock and roll band in the world.’”
Regards the fact that the music of the Detroit hellraisers MC5 was on the radio, it would be nice to think that at the time of David Thomas’s passing it was their song ‘Kick Out the Jams’ – with its immortal rallying cry of “Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!” – coming through the airwaves
It might, however, have been more apposite had it been ‘The Human Being Lawnmower’ from the MC5’s debut album as the song’s title alone reflects the creative trail David Thomas blazed throughout his career and how he cut through musical genres from garage rock to experimental noise via punk, post-punk, new wave, no wave, jazz and most points in between.
I first saw Pere Ubu at Newcastle University in 1978, a few months after the release of their brilliant debut album The Modern Dance. The raucous energy, abstract invention, anarchic surrealism, and wholesale rejection of punk rock captured on that record and the sight of Thomas banging the hell out of a cow bell on that campus stage all pointed towards a different future for rock’n’roll.
It would be another 21 years before I saw David Thomas in concert again. He was then performing as David Thomas & Two Pale Boys – on a double-header with another uncompromising musician, Kevin Coyne – one of the many side projects that he created either running parallel to Pere Ubu or at times when the mothership was in temporary dry dock. That night in the bowels of the converted mills of Dean Clough in Halifax his hulking presence emerged from the deep shadows like some modern-day Hank Quinlan, the bent Police Captain played by Orson Welles in the classic 1958 film noir Touch of Evil.
With remarkable prescience Tanya (Marlene Dietrich) tells Quinlan in that film that his “future is all used up.” It is there that any similarities with David Thomas end. By then Thomas was already 11 studio albums into the Pere Ubu discography with eight more records still to come alongside a continuation of his incredibly diverse side projects, which included a 2002 West End production of “junk opera” Shockheaded Peter.
I last saw David Thomas with Pere Ubu at the long-since-gone Fibbers venue in York. That night reinforced my previously held view that a direct line could be drawn between him and the Captain Beefheart of Trout Mask Replica time, the man who put his band through a challenging, rigorous, and very controlling rehearsal process to produce one of the greatest albums of all time. Thomas placed similar demands on his band and also produced such forward-thinking results. And just like Beefheart, David Thomas was a unique talent and a true musical visionary.
Like the name of David Thomas’s previous band Rocket From The Tombs, his productivity will continue from beyond the grave. The Facebook post that announced his death stated that Thomas had been recording an album that “he knew was to be his last”. This album will now be completed after his passing, along with an autobiography, and an archival project of live concerts.
Photos of David Thomas with Pere Ubu at Fibbers, York on 16th April 2013 by Simon Godley
